Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

Max Stirner´s Anarchist Gospel

Sixty years ago, a book entitled “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” (generally translated “The Individual and his Property”) was published in Berlin. It has been described as “the most revolutionary book ever written,” and its author. Max Stirner, was perhaps the leading intellectual precursor of modern philosophical anarchism. When he died, in 1856, in comparative poverty and obscurity, his theories had made but little headway; but during the years that have passed since then both book and author have commanded increasing study and respect. It begins to look as if Max Stirner might yet take rank with the great philosophic thinkers of the nineteenth century. He exerted profound influence over

Nietzsche, and, in the opinion of no less an authority than Eduard von Hartmann, his work surpasses that of Nietzsche “by a thousand cubits.” “Der Einzige” has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and Italian; and critical studies popularizing its arguments have appeared in almost all the European countries. George Brandes, a critic of rare discernment, is one of Stirner’s interpreters, and John Henry Mackay, the German poet, has written his biography. On Mackay’s initiative a suitable stone has been placed above Stirner’s grave in Berlin, and a memorial tablet upon the house in which he died; and this spring another tablet is to be set upon the house in Bayreuth where he was born in 1806.

An English translation¹⁾The Ego and His Own. By Max Stirner. Translated from the German by Steven T. Byington, with an Introduction by J. L. Walker. Benj. R. Tucker, New York. of “Der Einzige,” which has just appeared in New York under the title, “The Ego and His Own,” makes Stirner’s gospel accessible for the first time to American and English-speaking readers. He is difficult to read, and his oddities of composition and terminology often tend to obscure his meaning. “There is nothing more disconcerting,” one of his French commentators has confessed, “than the first approach to this strange work. Stirner does not condescend to inform us as to the architecture of his edifice, or furnish us the slightest guiding thread. . . . The apparent divisions of the book are few and misleading. The repetitions are innumerable. At first one seems to be confronted with a collection of essays strung together, with a throng of aphorisms. . . . But, if you read this book several times; if, after having penetrated the intimacy of each of its parts, you then traverse it as a whole—gradually the fragments weld themselves together, and Stirner’s thought is revealed in all its unity, force, and depth.”

There are many points of similarity between the philosophies of Stirner and of Nietzsche. Both might take as their creed the ringing lines of Swinburne:

Honor to man in the highest!

For man is the master of things.

But while Nietzsche speaks with the inspired accents of a poet, Stirner writes as a philosophical partizan. The former fires the imagination with an essentially aristocratic vision of the “Superman”; the latter proclaims that each individual man is supreme and perfect in himself. Against the opening words of his first chapter, Stirner sets two mottoes, one from Feuerbach, that “man is to man the supreme being”; the other from Bruno Bauer, that “man has just been discovered.” He adds the comment: “Then let us take a more careful look at this supreme being and this new discovery.”

With a confidence worthy of Carlyle, who once declared that there were twenty-seven million people in England, “mostly fools,” Stirner says that when he looks out on the modern world he can only regard the majority of men as “veritable fools, fools in a mad house.” He means that we do not know how to think, how to be ourselves. We take our lives and opinions as they are handed to us; we believe in “spooks” of all kinds; we have “wheels in our heads;” we are all slaves of fixed ideas. It is “fixed ideas” that especially excite Stirner’s wrath, and by this term he means ideas of God, marriage, the state, of law, duty, morality. Humanity will only begin to live, he avers, when it gets rid of all fixed ideas.

The trouble with all of us to-day, he asserts, is that we think in crowds, and that our knowledge is alien to us. To follow his argument:

“God. Immortality, freedom, humanity, etc., are drilled into us from childhood, as thoughts and feelings which move our inner being more or less strongly, either ruling us without our knowing it, or sometimes in richer natures manifesting themselves in systems and works of art; but are always not aroused but imparted feelings, because we must believe in them and cling to them. . . .

Who is there that has never, more or less consciously, noticed that our whole education is calculated to produce feelings in us, i.e., impart them to us instead of leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out? If we hear the name of God, we are to feel veneration; if we hear that of the prince’s majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission; if we hear that of morality, we are to think that we hear something inviolable; if we hear of the Evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder, etc. The intention is directed to these feelings, and he who, e.g. should hear with pleasure the deeds of the ‘bad’ would have to be ‘taught what’s what’ with the rod of discipline. Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are ‘pronounced of age.’ Our equipment consists of ‘elevating feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles,’ etc. The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and. when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.

“We must not feel at everything and every name that comes before us what we could and would like to feel thereat; e.g., at the name of God we must think of nothing laughable, feel nothing disrespectful, it being prescribed and imparted to us what and how we are to feel and think at mention of that name.

“That is the meaning of the care of souls,—that my soul or my mind be tuned as others think right, not as I myself would like it. How much trouble does it not cost one finally to secure to one’s self a feeling of one’s own at the mention of at least this or that name, and to laugh in the face of many who expect from us a holy face and a composed expression at their speeches. What is imparted is alien to us, is not our own, and therefore is ‘sacred,’ and it is hard work to lay aside the ‘sacred dread of it.’ “

In the terminology of Stirner’s subversive gospel, “everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”

According to his view of life, all progress consists in the breaking of previously accepted laws. “The history of the world,” he says, “shows that no tie has yet remained unrent, that man tirelessly defends himself against ties of every sort.” And so he adjures the youth of his age, and of every age, to become rebels, to “practice refractoriness, yes, and complete disobedience.” Such adjuration, he is aware, is likely to fall, for the most part, on deaf ears.

“One needs only admonish you of yourselves to bring you to despair at once. ‘What am I?’ each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star! How am I to obtain a correct answer if, without regard to God’s commandments or to the duties which morality prescribes, without regard to the voice of reason, which in the course of history, after bitter experiences, has exalted the best and most reasonable thing into law, I simply appeal to myself? My passion would advise me to do the most senseless thing possible. Thus each deems himself the—devil; for if, so far as he is unconcerned about religion, etc., he only deemed himself a beast, he would easily find that the beast, which does follow only its impulse (as it were, its advice), does not advise and impel itself to do the ‘most senseless’ things, but takes very correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are—terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness ; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils. Of course, it comes into your head at once that your calling requires you to do the ‘good,’ the moral, the right. Now, if you ask yourselves what is to be done, how can the right voice sound forth from you, the voice which points the way of the good, the right, the true, etc.? What concord have God and Belial?

“But what would you think if one answered you by saying : ‘That one is to listen to God, conscience, duties, laws, etc., is flim-flam with which people have stuffed your head and heart and made you crazy’? And if he asked you how it is that you know so surely that the voice of nature is a seducer? And if he even demanded of you to turn the thing about and actually to deem the voice of God and conscience to be the devil’s work? There are such graceless men; how will you settle them? You cannot appeal to_ your parsons, parents, and good men, for precisely these are designated by them as your seducers, as the true seducers and corrupters of youth, who busily sow broadcast the tares of self-contempt and reverence to God, who fill young hearts with mud and young heads with stupidity.”

The real gist of Stirner’s argument is already apparent. His logic can have but one eventuation. He challenges men everywhere simply—to be themselves. “I recognize no other source of right,” he says, “than me.” He continues: “If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are every moment all that we can be; and we never need be more.”

From this it follows that there is no absolute standard of right or wrong. What is right for one man may be wrong for another, and vice versa. Moreover:

“A man is ‘called’ to nothing, and has no ‘calling,’ no ‘destiny,’ as little as a plant or a beast has a ‘calling.’ The flower does not follow the calling to complete itself, but it spends all its forces to enjoy and consume the world as well as it can, — i.e., it sucks in as much of the juices of the earth, as much air of the ether, as much light of the sun, as it can get and lodge. The bird lives up to no calling, but it uses its forces as much as is practicable; it catches beetles and sings to its heart’s delight. But the forces of the flower and the bird are slight in comparison to those of a man, and a man who applies his forces will affect the world much more powerfully than flower and beast. A calling he has not, but he has forces that manifest themselves where they are because their being consists solely in their manifestation, and are as little able to abide inactive as life, which, if it ‘stood still’ only a second, would no longer be life. Now, one might call out to the man, ‘use your force.’ Yet to this imperative would be given the meaning that it was man’s task to use his force. It is not so. Rather, each one really uses his force without first looking upon this as his calling: at all times everyone uses as much force as he possesses. One does say of a beaten man that he ought to have exerted his force more; but one forgets that, if in the moment of succumbing he had had the force to exert his forces (e.g., bodily forces), he would not have failed to do it: even if it was only the discouragement of a minute, this was yet a—destitution of force, a minute long. Forces may assuredly be sharpened and redoubled, especially by hostile resistance or friendly assistance; but where one misses their application one may be sure of their absence, too. One can strike fire out of a stone, but without the blow none comes out; in like manner a man, too, needs ‘impact.’

“Now, for this reason that forces always of themselves show themselves operative, the command to use them would be superfluous and senseless. To use his forces is not man’s calling and task, but is his act, real and extant at all times.”

The argument that the world will “go to the dogs” in the moment that each man does as seems best in his own eyes, is met, in part, in Stirner’s apostrophe to youth, already quoted. He returns to the point again and again. To those who exclaim, “Society will fall to pieces!” he replies: Men will seek one another as long as they need one another. “But surely one cannot put a rascal and an honest man on the same level!” To this Stirner makes answer:

“No human being does that oftener than you judges of morals; yes, still more than that, you imprison as a criminal an honest man who speaks openly against the existing constitution, against the hallowed institutions, etc., and you entrust portfolios and still more important things to a crafty rascal. So in praxi you have nothing to reproach me with. ‘But in theory!’ Now there I do put both on the same level, as two opposite poles,—to wit, both on the level of the moral law. Both have meaning only in the ‘moral’ world, just as in the pre-Christian time a Jew who kept the law and one who broke it had meaning and significance only in respect to the Jewish law; before Jesus Christ, on the contrary, the Pharisee was no more than the ‘sinner and publican.’ So before self-ownership the moral Pharisee amounts to as much as the immoral sinner.”

Carrying this startling argument still further, Stirner brands the philanthropists of today as “the real tormentors of humanity.” He cries:

“Get away from me with your ‘philanthropy’! Creep in, you philanthropist, into the ‘dens of vice,’ linger awhile in the throng of the great city: will you not everywhere find sin, and sin, and again sin? Will you not wail over corrupt humanity, not lament at the monstrous egoism? Will you see a rich man without finding him pitiless and ‘egoistic’? Perhaps you already call yourself an atheist, but you remain true to the Christian feeling that a camel will sooner go through a needle’s eye than a rich man not be an ‘un-man.’ How many do you see anyhow that you would not throw into the ‘egoistic mass’? What, therefore, has your philanthropy [love of man] found? Nothing but unlovable men! And where do they all come from? From you, from your philanthropy! You brought the sinner with you in your head, therefore you found him, and therefore you inserted him everywhere. Do not call men sinners, and they are not: you alone are the creator of sinners; you, who fancy that you love men, are the very one to throw them into the mire of sin, the very one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men and un-men, the very one to befoul them with the slaver of your possessedness; for you love not men, but man. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner, you have only—dreamed of him.”

“I want to be all and have all that I can be and have.” This, says Stirner, is the inevitable basis of conduct. To this we must all come sooner or later. He adds:

“Whether others are and have anything similar, what do I care? The equal, the same, they can neither be nor have. I cause no detriment to them, as I cause no detriment to the rock by being ‘ahead of it’ in having motion. If they could have it, they would have it.

“To cause other men no detriment is the point of the demand to possess no prerogative; to renounce all ‘being ahead,’ the strictest theory of renunciation. One is not to count himself as ‘anything especial,’ such as, e.g., a Jew or a Christian. Well, I do not count myself as anything especial, but as unique. Doubtless I have similarity with others; yet that holds good only for comparison or reflection; in fact, I am incomparable, unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind. If you bring them under the generalities ‘flesh, mind,’ those are your thoughts, which have nothing to do with my flesh, my mind, and can least of all issue a ‘call’ to mine.

“I do not want to recognize or respect in you anything, neither the proprietor nor the ragamuffin, nor even the man, but to use you. In salt I find that it makes food palatable to me, therefore I dissolve it; in the fish I recognize an ailment, therefore I eat it; in you I discover the gift of making my life agreeable, therefore I choose you as a companion. Or, in salt I study crystallization, in the fish animality, in you men, etc. But to me you are only what you are for me,—to wit, my object; and because my object, therefore my property.”

The question arises finally: What is truth? With relentless logic, Stirner replies: “As long as you believe in the truth you do not believe in yourself, and are a—servant, a —religious man (that is, a bound man). You alone are the truth, or, rather, you are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you.” He says, in concluding:

“The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs are alive,—to wit, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me.

“Objects are to me only material that I use up. Wherever I put my hand I grasp a truth, which I trim for myself. The truth is certain to me, and I do not need to long after it. To do the truth a service is in no case my intent; it is to me only a nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes are for my digesting stomach, or as a friend is for my social heart. As long as I have the humor and force for thinking, every truth serves me only for me to work it up according to my powers. As reality or worldliness is ‘vain and a thing of naught’ for Christians, so is the truth for me. It exists exactly as much as the things of this world go on existing although the Christian has proved their nothingness; but it is vain, because it has its value not in itself but in me. Of itself it is valueless. The truth is a—creature.

“As you produce innumerable things by your activity, yes, shape the earth’s surface anew and set up works of men everywhere, so too you may still ascertain numberless truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight in them. Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve your newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to set them running for my benefit, so, too, I will only use your truths, without letting myself be used for their demands.

“All truths beneath me are to my liking; a truth above me, a truth that I should have to direct myself by, I am not acquainted with. For me there is no truth, for nothing is more than I!”

THE COMPLETE NIETZSCHE.¹⁾“The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche.” (First complete and Authorised Translation in 18 volumes). Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. (T. N. Foulis.

One cannot contemplate the completion of the English translation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche without feelings of gratitude towards the practical enthusiasm of Dr. Oscar Levy who has guided so remarkable an enterprise to success. At the outset, the production of a complete set of Nietzsche’s works in English was not without commercial hazard, but the results must indeed be gratifying to all concerned for (and it will come as a surprise to many people) no less than seven of the eighteen volumes comprising the edition are in a second, and three are in a third edition. That would indicate the existence of a public seriously interested in Friedrich Nietzsche, for it may be surmised with some certainty that the light interest aroused by journalistic exploitation of the challenge of his thought, and the tragedy of his life, has long since been surfeited, and those who skim over the surface of philosophic fashions are engaged elsewhere. There are, as a matter of fact, a great many people who feel, rightly or wrongly, that Nietzsche has a message for them; and their number is still respectable after it has been written down by the subtraction of those (and they are still many) who misuse or misunderstand him, drawn as they have been to his work by his apparent, but apparent only to the dull-witted, advocacy of moral license, and his childish and often irritating insistence on a desire to write only for the elect. To say you write for the elect is the surest way of attracting the mediocre. But, whatever, the status of Nietzsche’s public there is little doubt that his thought and ideas are at length receiving something like acceptance in this country, or rather, we are at length in the heyday of surprise at the daring of the great German psychologist, although long after he has ceased to startle our continental neighbors. But up to the present, his direct influence has been small, what real influence he has had on English writers has been indirect, coming through French, German, and Italian authors who have written under his spell. It may be indeed that Nietzsche will not affect us as he has affected others, for we have become inured to the flaming aphorism of revolt in this country by the genius of Mr. Bernard Shaw, a thinker bearing many superficial resemblances to Nietzsche, though fundamentally opposed to him. So similar at times have these two thinkers been that shallow critics have hinted rather broadly as to Mr. Shaw’s continental inspirers. The author of “Man and Superman” is strong enough to be his own first line of defense, but it is interesting to note, in the light of past criticisms of his originality, that the publication of Nietzsche’s autobiography, “Ecce Homo,” actually lays the German open to the charge of having plagiarised the Irishman! In this autobiography, which is, by the way, one of the most remarkable and inspiring books ever written, Nietzsche repeatedly uses the egotistical gags which have been the stock properties of Bernard Shaw’s drum and trumpeting for something like a quarter of a century. Before G.B.S. an autobiography like “Ecce Homo,” with such chapter headings as “Why I am so wise,” “Why I am so clever,” and “Why I write such excellent books,” might have evoked an admonitory leader in The Times, and scare headlines in the Daily Mail; but familiarity with that method of self-expression has, as usual, produced indifference.

This is not the place or the time to interpret the Nietzschean idea, even if one could grant that place or time were ever proper to such an endeavor, which is doubtful. No interpretation of Nietzsche can have anything but a purely subjective value. Nietzsche has ever been his own best interpreter, but he becomes doubly so by the publication of “Ecce Homo,” which, with a stroke of the pen as it were, robs all his friendly commentators of their validity. All that need be said in a general way about Nietzsche, either in elucidation, in extenuation, or even in praise, is said in this wonderful book, and it is said on the authority of the only final authority, Friedrich Nietzsche himself, that is why Dr. Oscar Levy might have stayed the energy of his translators at the translation, and added himself the few necessary bibliographical and biographical details which are really all the preface each volume requires; not that the existing prefaces are incapable, they are unnecessary. Beyond a natural feeling against being talked to by what might be called conscientious Nietzscheans, before beginning one of the Master’s books, I have none but feelings of gratitude for this splendid monument to the genius of the deepest and the highest thinker of our time. The volumes themselves are convenient and quietly dignified both as to type and binding.

The completion of the English translation of his works gives us in this country the first chance of drawing for ourselves a full-length portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, and we are helped very considerably in this task by “Ecce Homo,” which is at least a three-quarter portrait of the artist by himself. In this book he not only reveals his own ideas one by one in a sort of organic relationship with each other, but he reveals himself also in relation to them, and here they do not always square well together; particularly in the philosopher’s aspiration to be a satyr rather than a saint, for Nietzsche was by constitution the latter. He admits to never having had a desire, and from what we know of his life we can believe him: perhaps even Nietzsche was sentimentalizing when he patronized the satyr. His love of health also is unrelated to his condition, or rather related contrariwise, for, of course, it is not the first time an invalid has written vehemently of health. Such inconsistencies are forced upon readers of Nietzsche, not because they affect his philosophy, but because in so intensely personal a thinker they affect your view of him. The fact that his sanity gave way just after he had written “Ecce Homo,” in 1889, has been used by many writers as an argument against his ideas, but the relationship, in this case, is very remote. Nietzsche was undoubtedly sane when he wrote his books, he wrote nothing after his mind gave way. It is conceivable that even the strongest of minds might break beneath such pressure as Nietzsche could bring to bear upon himself, for he was no formal thinker; he did not codify and co-ordinate the already thought-out, he constant1y, made tracks into the unknown, and it is inconceivable that his ideas should be finally condemned and repudiated because of that. It may be unusual to say instinct is superior to reason; it may be illogical to stigmatize morality as decadent; it may have been wrong of him to prefer Dionysus to Christ or satyr to saint; his objection to ideals may have been inconvenient; his deep sense of the formative value of tragedy may have been unpleasant, and his dream of superman, absurd. But neither the charges of being unusual, illogical, wrong, inconvenient, unpleasant, or even absurd, are sufficient, severally or collectively, to convict a man of insanity–or there are very few of us sane. One idea, and one only, in the whole of Nietzsche’s works touches the borderland, that is his conception of “eternal recurrence,” but that idea, upon which one might brood oneself into Bedlam, is by no means peculiar to him, it exists in all its appalling emptiness in several writers and in many forms. Friedrich Nietzsche is really much saner than most men, or perhaps than any man–he is as sane as the animals. It is his extreme naturalism, in an age conventional and artificial in idea and habit, that arouses doubts as to his sanity. Nietzsche is the naturalist of psychology–a sufficiently new thing to attract and repel. Like life, he is paradoxical, a yea-saying and a destruction. To accept life as a battle and take the consequences without revenge or resentment–and what does not destroy you creates you–that is the essence of Nietzsche. And after breathing the rare air of his thoughts one feels that the unwritten lave is no longer unwritten, the contentiousness of life no longer a contention. He calls one of his books, “a book for all and none,”–Nietzsche may be described as a philosopher for all and none.

HOLBROOK JACKSON.

*

The newest issue of Der Geist, the journal of historical Egoism, is here. Rare and unpublished works from the first century of egoism-the philosophy of Max Stirner.

from: Underworld Amusements or from Amazon.com: US | MX | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT

This issue of Der Geist includes rare reprints of egoist history. These include blow-by-blow accounts of Dora Marsden in her street-fighting phase, lost transcriptions of J. William Lloyd saved from the darkness by individualist feminist Wendy McElroy, the philosophical and physical wanderings of the laughing philosopher Malfew Seklew, and more. This issue of Der Geist also includes original inquiries into egoist history. These include a history of the Radical Book Shop of Chicago, and the heretofore undocumented bands of iron that link the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblys”) and Ragnar Redbeard’s book Might is Right.

Sections:

1. Dora Marsden
2. J. William Lloyd
3. Malfew Seklew
4. Laurance Labadie
5. Max Stirner
6. Free Spirits
7. Ragnar Redbeard

The following review appeared in The Match!, Issue 117, Spring 2018. The Match! has been edited and published by Fred Woodworth since 1969. A Critique of Anarchist Communism is the 12th issue of the Stand Alone journal, a is mixed medium and format journal produced at irregular intervals.

A CRITIQUE OF ANARCHIST COMMUNISM, by Ken Knudson.
($8 from Underworld Amusements)

This short work (80 pages) attempts to put anarchism back upon a footing of desire for freedom. Marxism, however, is the tar-baby that anarchism seems less and less able to un-stick itself from. In a valuable Afterword, the author addresses persons who are caught In this La Brea pit and have perhaps not yet sunk out of sight:

“…When it comes to economics, your mind suddenly becomes rigid. You forget your sound anarchist principles and surrender without a struggle the one thing that makes you an anarchist: your freedom…
“In commendably searching for remedies against poverty, inequality and injustice, you forsake the doctrine of freedom for the doctrine of authority…”

Then, quoting our vanished friend of so many years ago, S.E. Parker:

“‘The trouble is that what you call anarchism is at best merely a hodge-podge, halfway position precariously suspended between socialism and anarchism. You yearn for the ego-sovereignty, the liberating individualism, that is the essence of anarchism, but remain captives of the democratic-proletarian-collectivist myths of socialism. Until you can cut the umbilical cord that still connects you to the socialist womb you will never be able to come to your full power as self-owning individuals. You will still be lured along the path to the lemonade springs and cigarette trees of the Big Rock Candy Mountains.'”

We recommend this small book, but in a forlorn sense. Like a doctor looking on as a sick man in the direst straits convulses and vomits, we now rattle a lone last capsule in its empty bottle and reflect that at one time an extended course of massive doses might have burned out the disease. But the antibiotic wasn’t taken regularly or in large enough quantities. And now for that patient it is, at last,too late.

The following review appeared in Reason magazine for Nov. 2017, and later online. It was written by Jesse Walker.

The most famous individualist anarchist journal of 19th century America was Liberty, edited by the fiery polemicist Benjamin Tucker. But Liberty wasn’t the movement’s only periodical, and anyone interested in that period of libertarian history should welcome any chance to examine the outlets edited by figures with different sensibilities. So it’s good to see Georgia and Henry Replogle’s journal Egoism reprinted in a hefty new book, Egoism: The First Two Volumes, 1890–1892 (Union of Egoists).

In some ways Tucker and the Replogles were peas in a pod: Each mixed the radical egoism of Max Stirner with the monetary schemes of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. But there are differences here too, with Egoism putting a stronger stress on feminism and free love. Neither Replogle was as talented a writer as Tucker, and the range of contributors here isn’t as large as Tucker’s stable. But if Egoism wasn’t ultimately as good a publication as Liberty, it’s still interesting in its own right.

Some introductory material provides historical context for the journal, including the entertaining tale of the editors’ brief stay in the town of Liberal, Missouri. Founded as an alleged haven for free thought by George Walser, a man who hoped to ban both churches and saloons from his city, Liberal attracted and then repelled the Replogles, who were driven out for espousing free love. Walser later converted to spiritualism, and in time the town would host vast conventions of people hoping to speak with the dead.

findacenter.com defines “New Thought” as “…a spiritual path or movement formed primarily by Suffragettes. Abolitionists and Free Thinkers guided by Core Concepts which include: co-creation, human rights and scientific thinking.”

wikipedia: The New Thought movement was based on the teachings of Phineas Quimby (1802–1866), an American mesmerist and healer. Quimby had developed a belief system which included the tenet that illness originated in the mind as a consequence of erroneous beliefs and that a mind open to God’s wisdom could overcome any illness. His basic premise was:

The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in […] Therefore, if your mind had been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory or truth, I come in contact with your enemy, and restore you to health and happiness. This I do partly mentally, and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impression and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure.

Philosophy of Egoism, by James L. Walker.
Published by Katherine Walker, Denver, Colo. For sale by Benj. R. Tucker, Box 1312
N. Y. City, and by H. P. Replogle, Box 1307, Denver, Colo. Price, 75c and 35c, according
to binding. This book is a labor of love on part of the publishers. It may be classed as a treatise upon Philosophic Anarchy, though the author rather denys this and calls it “Individualism.” The author was a deep and logical thinker. Any one accepting his premises will be carried along to his conclusions. It is good reading for one to sharpen his mental teeth upon, because it is full of philosophical reasoning. Personally I am not able to decide upon its value, for it is the antithesic of my “Soul Culture” philosophy. That the author is a
man well posted and one who fortifies his positions by sound reasoning is evident on every page. The place and use of such reasoning the world must decide.

Available from Amazon.com or Underworld Amusements.

“Old Mad Max is back with a vengeance! The first issue Der Geist is a tight cluster of time bombs, many of which have been quietly ticking away in forgotten corners for more than a century, only to erupt now and blast away the fog that drapes a modern reader’s mind. The philosophy of Egoism—also known as Individualist Anarchism—was first kindled by the German firebrand Max Stirner in the mid nineteenth century. Stirner’s uncompromising ideas attracted a colorful band of fellow travelers in Europe and America before being edged out by the shabby collectivist ideologies that claim to represent liberation, but always end in moraline ghettoes of groupthink at best, or homicidal slave-states at worst. Der Geist unveils a secret history of self-sovereignty that is as incendiary as it is inspirational.”